The advertising of tea enables us to observe how the economic and political exploits of planters in the late nineteenth century shifted the identity of tea from a Chinese product to an Indian/Ceylonese one. Before 1838, the only country to cultivate and export tea was China. The battle for markets in the tea industry was always aggressive. Both the Ceylonese and Indian planters established organisations to represent their interests and promote the consumption of Ceylon and Indian tea. In the 1880s and 1890s the conflicting identity of tea as a Chinese or Indian/Ceylon product expresses the conflicts of companies with separate interests. It is clear that the planters exploited and created racist/'Orientalist' constructs that were useful to them. The unbending racial and colonial hierarchies which the planters upheld are perceivable in the rigid systems of order that were represented in the advertising of Lipton's and other tea companies.

Turning his gaze far upstream, away from the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, Roland Barthes might have taken as archetypal of such feuilletage, or multi-layering, the intertextual practices of classical antiquity. Trans-generic textual transfers not only favour an exploration of gender assumptions, they trigger off a wider process that approaches categories through their permeability. As it plunges its roots into the multi-layered, contrasted textual system of antiquity, Shakespeare's text develops its own all-inclusive, non-discriminatory vision. Based on textual dialogues, it calls for new types of dialogue. The forms of integration that it operates, beyond temporal and cultural differences, favour hybridisation, variegation and contamination in open configurations that emphasise the fluidity of frontiers, whether textual or cultural - so that it might be at least partly thanks to its multi-textuality, itself based on trans-textuality, that Shakespeare's text has become and remains essentially multi-cultural.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book is about the 'colonisation of consciousness'. It examines finance houses, shipping firms, commercial companies, and industrial concerns utilising colonial products existed in each of the European countries. The book offers six case studies, embracing France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, providing evidence for the developments right across (mainly Western) Europe. The exercise of power in each case was, of course, very different, but both were vital to the continuing existence and extension of the imperial project. The book establishes the imperialism involved key articulations of power which operated in multiple directions, directed at indigenous peoples and settlers on the one hand and at members of the domestic population on the other. It demonstrates the inter-war years that saw the stepping up of imperial propaganda throughout the surviving imperial powers.

Characterisations of Victorian naval manhood imparted the virtues of the imperial manly ideal, valorising discipline, duty and a moral Christian ethos. The rhetoric of naval manhood was reconstructed in part because older images of it were irreconcilable with the demands of empire. Although the First World War was not a naval war, representations of naval manhood responded to and served the war effort, even if in contradictory ways. Celebrations of Jack Cornwell's heroism, forged in the naval battle of Jutland, helped to revive an older vision of manliness defined by duty, discipline and sacrifice in the face of the war's challenge to masculinity. Countless claims to the educational improvement of the naval ratings served as the basis from which the emergent lower-deck reform movement appealed to the Admiralty to improve personnel conditions in the early twentieth century.

This chapter presents an intertextual account of colonial discourse and psychotic delusion. By ‘reading madness’, the chapter aims to show the intimate relationship between prevailing ‘white writing’ and the imagination of the ‘white insane’. Returning to the idea of Africa as a site of madness, the chapter considers Mau Mau in the delusional content of European psychiatric patients in order to develop an analysis of the salience of transgression and its denial for the European settler at a time of incipient decolonisation.

The first chapter examines the ‘reform’ treatises written more or less during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII and how they impacted upon the development of government policy in Ireland up to 1546. I argue that most writers were overwhelmingly in favour of a programme of renewed conquest, beginning in those parts of Leinster immediately adjoining the Dublin-centred Pale, and that they believed this would finally be initiated following the Kildare Rebellion in the mid-1530s. However owing to Henry VIII’s unwillingness to fund such a conquest a cheap strategy of conciliation known as ‘surrender and regrant’ was briefly experimented with in the early 1540s. The chapter also examines the policy debate, and treatises written on, religious reform and regional reform of Munster and Ulster through the establishment of provincial councils and settlement of colonies.

Sarah Hicks Williams, the newly married bride of Benjamin Franklin Williams, left her family home in New York to begin a new life thousands of miles away in the Southern slave-holding state of North Carolina. As Benjamin's wife, Sarah was poised to become mistress of her husband's Clifton Grove plantation in Greene County, North Carolina. Raised within a strong anti-slavery culture, the new mistress of Clifton Grove plantation determined to observe for herself the truth of abolitionist claims of Southern brutality towards their enslaved population. Once at Clifton Grove, though, Sarah accepted that the only household domestics she could call upon were enslaved women, for in North Carolina white women were generally excluded from domestic service. In Sarah's imagination, the enslaved women and men in her midst rapidly came to represent a naturally dirty and lazy people, a view commonly shared by Southern whites.